Comments on: openSUSE Project Announces csync

By: Andreas Schneider

Andreas Schneider — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:58:02 +0000

The Unison development has stopped since quite some time. Unison uses the rsync algorithm to synchronize files. However it is a clientserver architecture and not a client only implementation. There are more differences.

There is a paper available, but it is in German and not up2date.

http://projects.cynapses.org/DiplomaThesis/

By: Andreas Schneider

Andreas Schneider — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:55:55 +0000

No, this is about Roaming Home Directories and not Roaming Profiles. Roaming Profiles is something else, but some parts are similar.

By: Birger

Birger — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:39:20 +0000

This looks very interesting. I have been looking at different solutions for a long time and only iFolder has looked reasonably good. But… iFolder seems like a dead project.

How will csync react to files being updated from several loations? If a user has two machines loged on with the same userid, there is a possibility for interesting events :-)

By: James Mason

James Mason — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:29:12 +0000

May I infer that the next release of SLED will automagically handle Roaming Profiles in an ActiveDirectory environment?

By: jramskov

jramskov — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:39:49 +0000

Forgot: There’s no rpm available for OpenSuse though :(

Also, the Linux implementation is for Nautilus, would be cool if there was one for Dolphin/Konqueror.

By: jramskov

jramskov — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:34:23 +0000

Another option is dropbox: http://getdropbox.com/

By: Grzegorz Kossakowski

Grzegorz Kossakowski — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:02:46 +0000

I’m wondering what are limitations of this tool and possible use cases. As someone already mentioned there is an unison tool which is very good and reliable software. The only drawback that really annoys me is its gui which really sucks. For example, establishing ignore rules is a joke as there is no gui support for pattern-base rules.

I don’t want to critique someone’s effort but I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just implement a decent GUI on top of existing unison backend. I can’t believe there is no way to call ocaml code from C.

Currently I’m using unison for synchronizing my laptop and desktop computers (my home folder to be precise). Here are some statistics:
grek@linux-p3yg:~> du -sh ~
49G /home/grek
grek@linux-p3yg:~> find ~ | wc -l
398913

This is quite a lot right? Unison handles this in 10 minutes provided there were not too much files changed. Unison uses very smart algorithm for transferring differences so it works quite well even over wifi. Of course I should mention that I have fast hard disks (especially on desktop) but still these 10 minutes is a really good result IMHO.

I guess that csync is meant to allow me to synchronize home directories in setup like above. What would be a performance of csync? Is csync based on some papers so I can be sure that running a tool that wants to deal with all of my data is *safe*?

Again, I don’t want to dismiss anyone’s work but I know that file synchronization in an efficient and safe way is not a piece of cake especially written in C and I wonder if it’s not better to focus on higher-level functionality like providing a really good GUI.

By: Andreas Schneider

Andreas Schneider — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:30:07 +0000

This is a bug. Thanks for the report :)

By: MCosta

MCosta — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:48:03 +0000

Hi,
I installed csync + pam_csync but the man file pam_csync.8.gz went to wrong place – /usr/share/man/man7 instead the right place /usr/share/man/man8.

Did I do something wrong?

By: Philip

Philip — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:56:13 +0000

Yes, my question too.